As Duke’s train rattled northward into Kentucky, he must have reflected on the swift changes that had come over his homeland since his last visit there early in the summer. When he was in Lexington in June—to marry Henrietta Morgan, John Morgan’s sister—the talk had been of neutrality. Life in the Bluegrass had seemed the same as always, the old congeniality and hospitality—soft-voiced males talking of horse trades and fox hunts, of shooting matches and cockfights—beautiful women living graciously in their spacious lofty-ceilinged houses with spiral staircases and rich mahogany woods, candelabras and great fireplaces with imposing carved mantels, drawing rooms and well-stocked libraries.
He loved it all, this land where every child old enough to ride had his horse and dog, every boy his gun. He loved the long vistas before the country houses, each with a winding drive approaching, and the trees—great oaks, hickories, walnuts, ash, and sugar maple. The air seemed always soft in the Bluegrass, the lines of the country soft and curving as a woman’s, the pastures in certain lights and seasons a dusty bluish-green.
Perhaps more than any of the young men whom he was to lead through four years of war, Basil Duke came closest to being a true Cavalier. One of his relatives described him as “essentially a man of the Seventeenth Century, that century in half-armor, torn between chivalry and realism.” Gravely remote, with deep-set eyes and a square jaw covered with a rich black beard, he attracted respect without raising his resonant voice. Duke once described a cavalier as a man who was “not only absolutely true to principle and conviction, but a strong strain of romantic sentiment pervaded his character, making him sensitive to everything he regarded as an obligation, either of honor or friendship,” adding almost as an afterthought: “He liked the hazard and excitement of battle.”
This might very well have been a description of John Morgan or of Basil Duke himself, though no two men could scarcely have been more different in temperament. Perhaps the essential difference was that Morgan could not qualify as an alligator horse, while Duke for all his gentility and chivalry was to prove himself to be tougher and more enduring than the hardiest of that legendary breed.
At Munfordville, the brothers-in-law met for the first time since Basil Duke’s marriage to Henrietta Morgan. “Captain Morgan,” Duke recorded, “was riding Black Bess when I met him at Munfordville in the early part of October.”
2
Green River Cavaliers
I
WHEN CAPTAIN JOHN MORGAN marched his column into a Confederate outpost at Green River on the last day of September, the new arrivals were greeted with rousing cheers. Colonel Roger Hanson, in command of the small force already there, was an old friend, having served with Morgan in the Mexican War, and the two men quickly reached an understanding. Hanson’s soldiers were infantrymen; the only horses in camp were a few heavy animals attached to a battery of artillery pieces. So it was agreed that those of Morgan’s “cavalrymen” who were dismounted for lack of horses would serve with Hanson’s infantry companies until such time as they might procure mounts for cavalry service.
Within a few days, Morgan’s small unit of mounted men was acting as Hanson’s advance picket force. Learning that a company of Federals had pushed down from Elizabethtown, they scouted up to Nolin Creek one day and had their first brush with some well-armed Federal infantrymen.
Morgan’s men saw the enemy’s bayonets glistening above a little rise in the road before they saw the troops, and with smooth precision immediately dismounted and posted themselves in thickets on either side the road, sending horse-holders to the rear, as prescribed in their military manuals. Everything went according to the books until the Federals came within firing range.
From that moment on, said one of the scouts, “every man acted as his own commander.” At the first fire, the Federals deployed to the flanks and opened a volley upon the Confederate ambush. Basil Duke described the encounter as being “much like a camp-meeting or an election row. After it had lasted ten or twelve minutes, an intelligent horse-holder came up from the rear, breathless, and announced the enemy was flanking us.…Every man withdrew after his own fashion and in his own time.”
Three Morgan men were slightly wounded in the decidedly un-military withdrawal, but even they agreed afterward that the fiasco was a useful lesson in military science. They had all learned that their prideful mastery of smart militia turns and drills was about as useful as a knowledge of Latin or Greek when applied to cavalry skirmishing.
A few days later, Morgan and Duke took the boys south of Green River to Woodsonville, where a number of other companies were establishing training camps. For several days the forests echoed with shouts and commands—as they practiced from D. H. Maury’s Skirmish Drill for Mounted Troops, with evolutions modified to suit the wooded countryside. To discourage a general inclination to open fire without command, Captain Morgan also drilled them in the infantry manual of arms.
Most of these rituals would be abandoned later in combat situations, but the leaders knew that something had to be done to establish habits of discipline and to develop a sense of mutual dependence among these freeborn youngsters. “Handle cartridge!” the sergeants would yell, and every man would take a cartridge from his cartridge box with thumb and first two fingers and carry it to his mouth. “Tear cartridge!” meant to bite off the paper end to the powder and carry it to the chamber of the weapon. At “Charge cartridge!” they emptied the powder into the chamber, pressing the ball in with the forefinger. Next came “Ram cartridge!” and “Prime!” Not until they accomplished all these movements were they prepared for “Commence firing!”
They endured this training without complaint only because the men in neighboring companies around Woodsonville were suffering the same treatment. None of them actually was officially a soldier of the Confederate States Army as yet, the various camps operating under such individualistic organization names as Deadshots, Hellroarers, and Yellow Jackets. The Lexington Rifles were generally known by that name, or simply as Morgan’s Company.
By October 27, Morgan had eighty-four men mounted and ready for service, and on that day Major William Preston Johnston, son of the commanding general, arrived to administer the oath which would muster them into Confederate service. The ceremony was held in front of an old Woodsonville church which Morgan was using as his headquarters. After the custom of the day, they elected their own officers. John Morgan of course was captain; Basil Duke, first lieutenant; James West, second lieutenant; and Van Buren Sellers, third lieutenant. Among the men were many who would later become officers when other companies were formed. The names have the ring of Robin Hood’s band: Tom Ballard, Ben Biggstaff, Ben Drake, David Llewellyn, William Leathers, Winder Monroe, Tom Quirk, Greenberry Roberts, Jeff Sisson. One of them, Winder Monroe, would meet William Preston Johnston again under rather strange circumstances in the last days of the war. These eighty men and their four officers would make much of the history of the yet-unformed 2nd Kentucky Cavalry.
They considered it quite an honor to have the commanding general’s son come up to Woodsonville to administer the oath, and were delighted to learn on the very next day that General Johnston himself was moving his headquarters from Nashville to Bowling Green. Some real action would follow, they were certain now, and few were surprised when on November 4, General Johnston sent them a special order: “Captain J. H. Morgan’s company will proceed without delay to Bowling Green and report for duty.”
Meanwhile three other cavalry companies which had been training along with Morgan’s men had been so impressed by the Lexington Rifles’ verve and esprit de corps that they requested permission to join them. One was under the command of Captain Thomas Allen; the other two being understrength were combined into one under Captain James Bowles. Thus “Morgan’s Company” became “Morgan’s Squadron,” his own company lettered A, the others B and C.
The manner in which Company A mounted all its troopers in order to meet cavalry company strength was unorthodox, to say the least. Not
icing thirty or so artillery horses standing idle most of the time around Colonel Hanson’s camp, Captain Morgan persuaded the Colonel to “condemn” them for artillery service. The animals’ actual unfitness was doubtful; Company A’s first use of them was on a sixty-eight-mile scout lasting twenty hours, and the big mounts came through in fine shape.
When his squadron was ordered to Bowling Green, Morgan felt obligated to return these borrowed steeds, but before doing so he secured from General Buckner an authorization on the Confederate quartermaster to buy horses for all his men. There was one hitch in the arrangement, however; the Kentucky quartermaster had no funds. With his usual persistence, Morgan extracted a promise from the quartermaster to pay later. He and his men would advance their own money to buy the horses.
It is unlikely that the promised money was ever received, as it became Confederate Army policy shortly afterward to require all cavalrymen to furnish their own mounts. The army could do this with equanimity because practically every Southern soldier wanted to be a cavalryman, and most of them were willing to buy, beg, or borrow a horse to get into the service.
Being Kentuckians, the troopers of Morgan’s squadron knew exactly what kind of horses they wanted. Those without funds borrowed from friends, relatives, or from the Captain himself, and went out through the countryside searching for mounts for sale. Good saddle horses cost around one hundred dollars (equal to five or six hundred dollars a century later) and the horse deals around Bowling Green in late 1861 must have been carefully considered transactions indeed.
One thing they were sure of—if the animal had Bluegrass blood in its line, it must be a good horse. The muscular fiber of the Bluegrass horse, they believed, when compared to that of any other area, “was as silk to cotton; the texture of the bone as ivory beside pumice stone.” Basil Duke was convinced that the American Saddle Horse breed, with its Thoroughbred blood, was the best for cavalry service. “The American Saddle Horse,” he said, “is very valuable for cavalry service because of other reasons than merely his superior powers of endurance. His smoother action and easier gaits render the march less fatiguing to the rider; he succumbs less readily to privations and exposures, and responds more cheerfully to kind and careful treatment. He acquires more promptly and perfectly the drill and habits of the camp and march, and his intelligence and courage make him more reliable on the field.”
Captain Morgan’s mare, Black Bess, was such an animal: “as nimble as a cat, agile as an antelope.” A touch of the ear would bring Black Bess “from a run to a lope, from a lope to a single-foot, from that to a fox-walk.”
In war matériel, the South was short of everything except fast cavalry horses. Because of this unique supremacy, Confederate cavalry troops would far outclass their Northern opponents during the first two years of war. Long before the war began, Southern planters had turned to using mules as work animals, devoting their tastes in horses to fine blooded stock for riding and sport. The breeding of blooded Thoroughbreds was so far advanced, for example, that some Southern states had laws on their books permitting owners of brood mares to geld any mature unblooded stallion caught running at large; the offended owner could collect damages from the stallion’s owner as well as the fee for castration.
Northern horse breeders, on the other hand, had been raising horses intensively for plow and wagon—draft horses in the cities, plow horses in the country—big, lumbering, slow-moving animals. In 1851, a Middlewestern breeder imported the great Percheron, Louis Napoleon, and “Norman” horses became a Northern fad during the following decade. These Yankee Percherons might pull ten tons, but they were “as wide as a barn door and slow as molasses,” and a Southern cavalryman would have laughed himself into stitches at the very thought of a man riding one off to war. A time would come, however, when some of Morgan’s men would gladly ride Percherons—under a hot July sun in flight across southern Ohio.
During those first months of war, therefore, it was not surprising that the South was able to put a superior cavalry force into the field from its rich supply of runners, trotters and hunters—horses accustomed to the saddle rather than traces, trained to the pressure of a knee or the drop of a rein. What could plowmen on plow horses expect to accomplish against such mounts as these?
2
In early December, Federal forces began threatening the Green River outposts, occupying Woodsonville and moving more men and supplies down from Louisville on the L. & N. Railroad. To strike a blow at this concentration of enemy strength, the Confederate command ordered Morgan’s squadron out on a special mission. With 105 picked men on fast horses, Captain Morgan left camp late on December 4, crossing Green River after dark and marching steadily on to the objective, a railroad bridge at Bacon Creek Station. They set the wooden bridge supports to blazing and stayed around long enough to see that it was completely destroyed, blocking railroad passage. Then they turned back south.
The Bacon Creek bridge was a minor incident in the war, but it was important for the squadron because it brought them their first national press notices. Newspaper correspondents from Nashville and Memphis had been waiting around Bowling Green for days, eager for news, and when the squadron rode in with a report of the bridge-burning, the correspondents made a big story of it. Other papers in the South reprinted the Bacon Creek bridge incident, and in time some Northern papers picked it up—the first of many stories to come from the exploits of Morgan’s raiders.
As autumn turned to winter along the Green River front, the Federal soldiers kept close to their camps, leaving Morgan’s squadron and the other cavalry commands at Bell’s Tavern, twenty-five miles east of Bowling Green, with little to do other than ride out on uneventful patrols. Yet there were other diversions. After the endless duties of saddling, bitting, packing, feeding, and shoeing mounts, they found time now for sitting around campfires. They learned to enjoy the smell of woodsmoke from crackling logs, the luxury of inaction after the weariness of long rides, the comradeship of men who have faced danger together. In a way this forest life was like living the pages from books of knighthood and romantic legendry which most of them had read—Ivanhoe, The Scottish Chiefs, La Morte d’Arthur, Robin Hood. Three months of outdoor living had leathered their skins and hardened their muscles so that they could stay in the saddle for twenty-four hours and come galloping back down the turnpikes to camp, singing at the top of their voices.
But with the coming of the new year of 1862, January rains and sleet set in, and camp life turned dreary indeed. A dozen diseases seemed to strike all at once. Measles, typhoid, pneumonia and dysentery were the most deadly, but even minor illnesses were often fatal to a man lying in a leaky brush shelter. As winter deepened, mortality ran high in the Army of Kentucky.
Morgan’s cavalrymen continued their patrol missions, however, bringing in more prisoners and more information until there was no longer any doubt that the Federal command was preparing a massive attack somewhere along the Kentucky front.
The big blow was dealt a hundred miles to the west by General Grant, who had moved south along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, his forces smashing Fort Henry into surrender February 6. Fort Donelson held out a few days longer, but Sidney Johnston did not dare risk leaving his main army at Bowling Green, with both its flanks being rolled up.
On February 14, Johnston issued orders for Bowling Green to be evacuated. It was a bleak Valentine’s Day for the men of Morgan’s squadron. Kentuckians all, they had endured the winter’s hardships thus far secure in their minds that with the coming of springtime the Confederate forces would smite the Federal Army a mighty blow and send it reeling back out of their home state and across the Ohio River. But now, suddenly in mid-February, here they were, instead, retreating south to Tennessee.
As they marched out on the road to Nashville, sleet was falling from a cold gray sky, and the only comfort John Morgan could give them was a vague promise that they might have an opportunity to do battle with enemy forces reported to be hellbent to head the Confeder
ate Army off from its line of escape south—the suspension bridge at Nashville over the Cumberland River.
3
“It seemed to us like a march to our graves,” one of Morgan’s troopers wrote of the retreat from Bowling Green. Although they encountered no human enemy along the frozen pike to Nashville, they were continually harassed by sleet, flurries of snow, and a wind that pierced “like needles of ice.” Many infantry companies, unable to obtain transport on railroad cars, were strung out along the roads.
The cavalry units covered the rear, and it was not until late on Sunday, February 16, that Morgan’s squadron crossed the strategic bridge over the Cumberland. Along the Nashville wharf a disorganized rabble of civilians had boarded some commissary boats loaded with supplies for the Confederate Army of Kentucky. Men were pitching slabs of bacon from the boats to the shore where others were loading carts and hauling the meat away. So hurried was the work of plundering these boats, many slabs of bacon splashed into the river waters. The squadron moved into Nashville through streets filled with panicked citizens, on to the public square where mobs were ransacking buildings.
By nightfall of the sixteenth, rumors spread that General Sidney Johnston would not attempt to make a stand in Nashville, and a long line of soldiers marching through the city all evening in a southeasterly direction was silent confirmation. The local government could not handle the roving mobs. Doors of the army’s commissary and quartermaster depots were thrown open to soldiers and civilians, and like a swarm of locusts they took what they wanted, strewing foodstuffs and bales of clothing and shoes out into the streets.